What Does Isaiah 34:9 Mean in the King James?
And the streams thereof shall be turned into pitch, and the dust thereof into brimstone, and the land thereof shall become burning pitch.
The analysis reads the King James wording.
King James Version The King James Version, first published in 1611. Selah Verse shows the standard text.
THE KEY
The pitch that can seal a vessel against the waters becomes here the burning substance of an entire landscape.
THE MEANING
The image makes judgment material and total: streams become pitch, dust becomes brimstone, and the land itself becomes burning pitch. Ruin reaches the watercourses, the soil, and the whole ground, turning the elements of a living landscape into fuel.
THE ROOT
זֶפֶת
zepheth
GROWS FROM
זפת
Pitch; coating or smearing with pitch.
Pitch can coat and protect an exposed vessel, yet here it becomes the burning surface of the whole land. The same material carries both shelter and destruction, depending on what it covers and what surrounds it.
ALSO GROWS
zāphath: To smear or coat with pitch.
זָפַת
This verb shows pitch as a covering material; in Exodus, it coats a small vessel to protect the life inside.
zepheth: Pitch.
זֶפֶת
The same noun names the substance used to coat Moses’ basket and the substance that becomes a burning landscape here.
נֶהֶפְכוּ
nehephĕkhu
GROWS FROM
הפך
To turn, overturn, or transform.
“turned” in this verse is nehephĕkhu. The root describes a turning that changes the state of what it touches. The scene is not only land being burned from outside; the land itself is transformed into the substance of its devastation.
ALSO GROWS
haphak: To turn or overturn.
הָפַךְ
This is the root behind “turned” here, naming the drastic change in what the streams and land have become.
mahpekhah: Overthrow.
מַהְפֵּכָה
The same root names the overthrow of Sodom, linking this transformation with a place brought into total ruin.
THE PATTERN
When judgment reaches a place, the conditions that sustain life become part of its devastation.
Then the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven;And that the whole land thereof is brimstone, and salt, and burning, that it is not sown, nor beareth, nor any grass groweth therein, like the overthrow of Sodom, and Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboim, which the LORD overthrew in his anger, and in his wrath:Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire: for strong is the Lord God who judgeth her.THE THREAD
And when she could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein; and she laid it in the flags by the river’s brink.Exodus uses the same Hebrew word, זֶפֶת (zepheth, pitch), for the coating that protects Moses’ basket from the water. Isaiah shows that same material as burning across the land: what shelters life in one scene becomes the substance of devastation in another.
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